The Problem With Obama's Reelection Message

Relying on a counterfactual, or alternate history, evokes a world that never was instead of a world that could yet be

Democratic Congressman Barney Frank recently captured the
problem with Obama's reelection message: "'It would have been even worse
without me' ain't much of a bumper sticker."

Obama doesn't have a factual problem, so much as a
counterfactual problem. A counterfactual is an alternate history, where we
imagine what would have happened if someone had made a different choice. A
recent piece in Time pointed out that a big part of the Obama pitch relies on
counterfactuals. In other words, if the president hadn't acted, things would
have been even worse. Without the stimulus and the bailouts, unemployment would
have been even higher. Without the intervention in Libya, Gaddafi would have
destroyed Benghazi.

Counterfactual thinking is perfectly reasonable. A
president is a success if his choices produced better results than the
alternative options. After all, Washington might not have passed the stimulus.
America would then be a different place -- for better or worse. And it is the gap
between the world we live in now, and this counterfactual world, that
represents the true "Obama effect."

But here's the problem. As a sell to the public,
counterfactuals have all the rhetorical power of an Anthony Weiner press
conference. The road untraveled just doesn't resonate. By definition,
counterfactuals didn't occur and are therefore difficult or impossible to
prove. A counterfactual scenario also lacks emotional intensity because it
never happened. Pondering what America would have been like in 2010, absent the
stimulus, with 12 or 13 percent unemployment, is a parlor game -- not an exercise
to get the heart racing.

Consider the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Many have
criticized the United States for failing to stop the killing. But imagine that
we rewind the tape of history, and this time Bill Clinton does send in the
Marines and the massacres never happen. Just like today in Libya, the president
would have defended the mission with a counterfactual -- we averted genocide. And
just like today in Libya, the intervention would probably be unpopular because
the genocide would only exist as a counterfactual, not as a lived reality.

Paradoxically, if the United States had waited to
intervene in 1994 until the genocide was well underway, Washington would have
saved fewer lives, but Clinton would have received more credit. His pitch would
no longer rely on a counterfactual -- the United States was actually stopping evil
in its tracks.

So what can Obama do about his counterfactual dilemma?
The obvious solution is to stick to the facts, and base his reelection pitch on
tangible progress. There is a world of difference between selling a Libyan
campaign that prevented worse massacres from happening, and selling a Libyan campaign that ended in Gaddafi's removal.

So does this mean that Obama should give up imagining
alternate worlds? Not at all. As the saying goes, politicians campaign in
poetry not in prose. We like visions of a different reality. It's just that we
get excited by alternate futures -- not by alternate pasts. Obama's poetry needs to evoke worlds that could yet be, not worlds that never were.